Faculty Experts

As a young clinical audiologist, Henry Louis Taylor Jr. found that the socioeconomic realities of many of his Black patients affected his ability to help them. To truly serve his community, he realized, he would need to understand the root causes of their circumstances. So he quit his job and went back to school to study urban history. Now, as the founding director of UB’s Center for Urban Studies at the School of Architecture and Planning, and associate director of the Community Health Equity Research Institute at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Taylor is on a mission to reverse the historic inequities that have created such a wide gap between Black lives and white lives. In this episode, the self-proclaimed activist scholar talks to host Ellen Goldbaum about his latest and most ambitious effort: The East Side Neighborhood Transformation Project.

Obsessed with true crime shows as a teen, Mary Bush naturally gravitated toward forensics as a young dental school professor. In this episode, she talks about her efforts to banish bitemark evidence from the U.S. court system, how she copes with the emotional toll of victim identification, and what it was like to appear on Netflix’s hit show “Unsolved Mysteries.”

Emily Grijalva’s first seminar as a PhD student in organizational behavior got her hooked on the subject of narcissism. Now a renowned expert, Grijalva has studied the complicated personality trait from every angle. In this episode, she tells us why narcissism isn’t all bad, why it’s more common in men and what to do if you have a narcissistic boss.

A childhood fascination with the fish and crabs in the river near his home led Vincent Lynch to a career as an evolutionary biologist, studying the genetic history of various species to better understand human health. In this episode, he explains why human pregnancy is a mystery, why elephants don’t get cancer and why bringing the woolly mammoth back to life is a terrible idea.